The Compleat Crow (17 page)

“We’re lucky,” Crow panted, strength and sanity surging back into his voice and manner. “Myself in particular. But then, I did Ragnar’s stone no harm—neither his stone nor his tomb.”

“And Sorlson?” I questioned, knowing the answer before it came.

“Oh, yes,” Crow answered with a nod, bending over the crumpled body. “He’s dead. Heart attack—or at least, that’s what they’ll call it!”

And of course Crow was right.

Two mornings later, at Crow’s invitation, I went round to Blowne House, his sprawling bungalow home on the outskirts of the city. When I arrived he had just done with sticking a newspaper clipping in one of his many, voluminous files of weird and unnatural events. I had, however, already taken note of the incident in question; it had been given space in most of the previous day’s newspapers:

THREE DIE IN MYSTERY CRASH ON M1

Of Ragnar’s stone there was no mention; but on that subject there was something I had yet to ask Crow. This is how he answered me:

“The inscription, Henri? Why, yes—I copied down the original runes and translated them later. I even put the thing to rhyme, as I believe it was inscribed, but of course my
kenning
isn’t much to mention:

Crow also mentioned his intention of returning to Allerston Forest one day—to see if he was correct in his belief that Ragnar had sailed his marker home again. I, for one, shall not be going with him…

Queen Nitocris’ Mirror!

I had heard of it, of course—was there ever an occultist who had not?—I had even read of it, in Geoffrey’s raving
People of the Monolith
, and knew that it was whispered of in certain dark circles where my presence is abhorred; I knew Alhazred had hinted of its powers in the forbidden
Necronomicon
, and that certain desert tribesmen still make a heathen sign which dates back untold centuries when questioned too closely regarding the legends of its origin.

So how was it that some fool auctioneer could stand up there and declare that this was Nitocris’ Mirror? How
dare
he?

Yet the glass was from the collection of Bannister Brown-Farley—the explorer-hunter-archaeologist who, before his recent disappearance, was a recognized connoisseur of rare and obscure
objets d’art
—and its appearance was quite as
outré
as the appearance of an object with its alleged history ought to be. Moreover, was this not the self-same auctioneer, fool or otherwise, who had sold me Baron Kant’s silver pistol only a year or two before? Not, mind you, that there was a single shred of evidence that the pistol, or the singular ammunition that came with it, had ever really belonged to the witch-hunting Baron; the ornately inscribed “K” on the weapon’s butt might stand for anything!

But of course, I made my bid for the mirror, and for Bannister Brown-Farley’s diary, and got them both. “Sold to Mr., er, it is Mr. de Marigny, isn’t it, Sir? Thought so!—sold to Mr. Henri-Laurent de Marigny, for…” For an abominable sum.

As I hurried home to the grey stone house which has been my home ever since my father sent me out of America, I could not help but wonder at the romantic fool in me which prompts me all too often to spend my pennies on such pretty tomfooleries as these. Obviously an inherited idiosyncrasy which, along with my love of dark mysteries and obscure and antique wonders, was undoubtedly sealed into my personality as a permanent stamp of my world-famous father, the great New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny.

Yet if the mirror really
was
once the possession of that awful sovereign—why! What a wonderful addition to my collection. I would hang the thing between my bookshelves, in company with Geoffrey, Poe, d’Erlette, and Prinn. For of course the legends and myths I had heard and read of it were
purely
legends and myths, and nothing more; heaven forbid!

With my ever-increasing knowledge of night’s stranger mysteries I should have known better.

At home I sat for a long time, simply admiring the thing where it hung on my wall, studying the polished bronze frame with its beautifully moulded serpents and demons, ghouls and efreets; a page straight out of
The Arabian Nights
. And its surface was so perfect that even the late sunlight, striking through my windows, reflected no glare but a pure beam of light which lit my study in a dream-engendering effulgence.

Nitocris’ Mirror!

Nitocris. Now
there
was a woman—or a monster—whichever way one chooses to think of her. A sixth-dynasty Queen who ruled her terror-stricken subjects with a will of supernatural iron from her seat at Gizeh—who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates—whose mirror allowed her glimpses of the nether-pits where puffed Shoggoths and creatures of the Dark-Spheres carouse and sport in murderous lust and depravity.

Just suppose this was the real thing, the abhorred glass which they placed in her tomb before sealing her up alive; where could Brown-Farley have got hold of it?

Before I knew it, it was nine, and the light had grown so poor that the mirror was no more than a dull golden glow across the room in the shadow of the wall. I put on my study light, in order to read Brown-Farley’s diary, and immediately—on picking up that small, flat book, which seemed to fall open automatically at a well-turned page—I became engrossed with the story which began to unfold. It appeared that the writer had been a niggardly man, for the pages were too closely-written, in a crabbed hand, from margin to margin and top to bottom, with barely an eighth of an inch between lines. Or perhaps he had written these pages in haste, begrudging the seconds wasted in turning them and therefore determined to turn as few as possible?

The very first word to catch my eye was—
Nitocris!

The diary told of how Brown-Farley had heard it put about that a certain old Arab had been caught selling items of fabulous antiquity in the markets of Cairo. The man had been jailed for refusing to tell the authorities whence the treasures had come. Yet every night in his cell he had called such evil things down on the heads of his jailers that eventually, in fear, they let him go. And he had blessed them in the name of Nitocris! Yet Abu Ben Reis was not one of those tribesmen who swore by her name—or against it! He was not a Gizeh man, nor even one of Cairo’s swarthy sons. His home tribe was a band of rovers wandering far to the west, beyond the great desert. Where, then, had he come into contact with Nitocris’ name? Who had taught him her foul blessing—or where had he read of it? For through some kink of fate and breeding Abu Ben Reis had an uncommon knack with tongues and languages other than his own.

Just as thirty-five years earlier the inexplicable
possessions
of one Mohammad Hamad had attracted archaeologists of the caliber of Herbert E. Winlock to the eventual discovery of the tomb of Thutmosis III’s wives, so now did Abu Ben Reis’s hinted knowledge of ancient burial grounds—and in particular the grave of the Queen of elder horror—suffice to send Brown-Farley to Cairo to seek his fortune.

Apparently he had not gone unadvised; the diary was full of bits and pieces of lore and legend in connection with the ancient Queen. Brown-Farley had faithfully copied from Wardle’s
Notes on Nitocris
; and in particular the paragraph on her “Magical Mirror”: “…handed down to their priests by the hideous gods of inner-Earth before the earliest civilizations of the Nile came into existence—a ‘gateway’ to unknown spheres and worlds of hellish horror in the shape of a mirror. Worshipped, it was, by the pre-Imer Nyahites in Ptathlia at the dawn of Man’s domination of the Earth, and eventually enshrined by Nephren-Ka in a black, windowless crypt on the banks of the Shibeli. Side-by-side, it lay, with the Shining Trapezohedron, and who can say what things might have been reflected in its depths? Even the Haunter of the Dark may have bubbled and blasphemed before it! Stolen, it remained hidden, unseen for centuries in the bat-shrouded labyrinths of Kith, before finally falling into Nitocris’ foul clutches. Numerous the enemies she locked away, the mirror as sole company, full knowing that by the next morning the death-cell would be empty save for the sinister, polished glass on the wall. Numerous the vilely chuckled hints she gave of the
features
of those who leered at midnight from out the bronze-barriered gate. But not even Nitocris herself was safe from the horrors locked in the mirror, and at the midnight hour she was wise enough to gaze but fleetingly upon it…”

The midnight hour! Why! It was ten already. Normally I would have been preparing for bed by this time; yet here I was, so involved, now, with the diary that I did not give my bed a second thought. Better, perhaps, if I had…

I read on. Brown-Farley had eventually found Abu Ben Reis and had plied him with liquor and opium until finally he managed to do that which the proper authorities had found impossible. The old Arab gave up his secret—though the book hinted that this knowledge had not been all
that
easy to extract—and the next morning Brown-Farley had taken a little-used camel-track into the wastes beyond those pyramids wherein lay Nitocris’
first
burial place.

But from here on there were great gaps in the writing—whole pages having been torn out or obliterated with thick, black strokes, as though the writer had realized that too much was revealed by what he had written—and there were rambling, incoherent paragraphs on the mysteries of death and the lands beyond the grave. Had I not known the explorer to have been such a fanatical antiquarian (his auctioned collection had been unbelievably varied) and were I not aware that he had delved, prior to his search for Nitocris’ second tomb, into many eldritch places and
outré
settings, I might have believed the writer mad from the contents of the diary’s last pages. Even in this knowledge I half believed him mad anyway.

Obviously he had found the last resting place of Nitocris—the scribbled hints and suggestions were all too plain—but it seemed there had been nothing left worth removing. Abu Ben Reis had long since plundered all but the fabled mirror, and it was after Brown-Farley had taken that last item from the ghoul-haunted tomb that the first of his real troubles began. From what I could make out from the now-garbled narrative, he had begun to develop a morbid fixation about the mirror, so that by night he kept it constantly draped!

But it was no good; before I could continue my perusal of the diary I had to get down my copy of Feery’s
Notes on the Necronomicon
. There was something tickling me, there at the back of my mind, a memory, something I should know, something which Alhazred had known and written about. As I took down Feery’s book from my shelves I came face to face with the mirror. The light in my study was bright and the night was quite warm—with that oppressive heaviness of air which is ever the prelude to violent thunderstorms—yet I shuddered strangely as I saw my face reflected in that glass. Just for a moment it had seemed to leer at me.

I shrugged off the feeling of dread which immediately sprang up in my inner-self and started to look up the section concerning the mirror. A great clock chimed out the hour of eleven somewhere in the night and distant lightning lit up the sky to the west beyond the windows of my room. One hour to midnight.

Still, my study
is
the most disconcerting place. What with those eldritch books on my shelves, their aged leather and ivory spines dully agleam with the reflection of my study light; and the
thing
I use as a paper-weight, which has no parallel in any sane or ordered universe; and now with the mirror and diary, I was rapidly developing an attack of the fidgets unlike any I had ever known before. It was a shock for me to realize that I was just a little uneasy!

I thumbed through Feery’s often fanciful reconstruction of the
Necronomicon
until I found the relevant passage. The odds were that Feery had not altered this section at all; except, perhaps, to somewhat modernize the ‘mad’ Arab’s old-world phraseology. Certainly it read like genuine Alhazred. Yes, there it was. And there, yet again, was that recurring hint of happenings at midnight:

For many moments I pondered that weird passage and the even weirder couplet which terminated it; and the minutes ticked by in a solemn silence hitherto outside my experience at The Aspens.

It was the distant chime of the half-hour which roused me from my reverie to continue my reading of Brown-Farley’s diary. I purposely put my face away from the mirror and leaned back in my chair, thoughtfully scanning the pages. But there were only one or two pages left to read, and as best I can remember the remainder of that disjointed narrative rambled on in this manner:

“10th. The nightmares on the
London
—all the way out from Alexandria to Liverpool—Christ knows I wish I’d flown. Not a single night’s sleep. Appears the so-called ‘legends’ are not so fanciful as they seemed. Either that or my nerves are going! Possibly it’s just the echo of a guilty conscience. If that old fool Abu hadn’t been so damned close-mouthed—if he’d been satisfied with the opium and brandy instead of demanding money—and for what, I ask? There was no need for all that rough-stuff. And his poxy waffle about ‘only wanting to protect me.’ Rubbish! The old beggar’d long since cleaned the place out except for the mirror…That damned mirror! Have to get a grip on myself. What state must my nerves be in that I need to cover the thing up at night? Perhaps I’ve read too much from the
Necronomicon
! I wouldn’t be the first fool to fall for that blasted book’s hocus-pocus. Alhazred must have been as mad as Nitocris herself. Yet I suppose it’s possible that it’s all just imagination; there are drugs that can give the same effects, I’m sure. Could it be that the mirror has a hidden mechanism somewhere which releases some toxic powder or other at intervals? But what kind of mechanism would still be working so perfectly after the centuries that glass must have seen? And why always at midnight? Damned funny! And those
dreams
! There
is
one sure way to settle it, of course. I’ll give it a few more days and if things get no better, well—we’ll have to wait and see.